Why becoming a promoter is the worst thing ever

A warning to all freshers about the dangers of the friendless world of club promoting…

As an innocent young fresher, the offer to “get paid to party” may well sound appetising; what this translates to is “we will give you £X for every person you bring into the club”. What better way to make friends than to all go out and get drunk whilst you are getting paid for it?! This is called becoming a ‘promoter’.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but if you do this for long enough most of your new ‘friends’ will start to think you are the worst person ever.

You see, the concept is flawed from the very beginning. Say if you decide to start promoting: you make some friends at freshers’, and then tell them to come to this night you’re hosting at to have a laugh. Your new found friends come and have a bad night and you will be the one to blame (this being their only impression of you). If it goes well, then sure, the first couple of events may seem really fun.

However, soon the whole clubbing experience will become a chore and inviting your friends to the same club nights week in, week out will start to get really, really annoying, especially for them.

This is most apparently manifested on social platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The chance of all your friends wanting to come to the same club night every week is little to none – the result of this is alienation of your peers through ‘cyber-pressuring’, if that’s a term. Prime examples include ‘F*CK READING WEEK, LET’S LOVE VODKA’, ‘MINISTRY OF SOUND MILKSHAKE: ONE CRAZY PARTY’, or ‘EGG REFRESHERS CRAZIEST LONDON CLUB NIGHTS’. All these upper case letters give me a headache, and when you are invited to one every two days it certainly begins to grind. It is like getting spam mail, but in your Facebook calendar.

A personal favourite is Mayfair club promoters. This comes with an abhorrent proliferation of guys posing with bottles of Grey Goose and tarted-up girls hanging off their shoulders.

I asked one of them who I vaguely know about whether they think promoting gains or loses him friends: “If I’ve ever lost friends from being a promoter a lot of it stems down to jealousy of what I can get.” This shows clearly why people begin to hate on promoters, especially for Mayfair clubs.

They want to be perceived as exclusive when the irony is that they are the ones inviting you to events 24/7, thus annulling the illusion of exclusivity that they try to achieve with their online personas. Indeed, he admits “I know people hate me for it, but you have to be fake and be nice to everyone if you want them to come to your club.”

To me this exposes the fatal flaw. De- spite the fact that a promoter may seem to know everyone (by the number of friends they have on Facebook, for example), nearly all these people are peripheral acquaintances who they may not have even met in person, with the result that they will probably have less real friends than you or I. In this way, personal marketing really can be detrimental to maintaining your friendships. Another source, who promotes for Ministry of Sound, tells me that “400 people unfriended me since I’ve been promoting”.

Thus my advice to you is that if you can help it, don’t sell your soul to the world of promoting – stay innocent and remain genuine. If you can’t help it for some strange reason, just don’t push it too much, or your close friends will soon become distant acquaintances.